NBC's "Meet the Press" is an American institution. It has been on the air for 76 years and is thus the longest-running show in American television history. I fondly remember hearing the show's iconic theme music blaring every Sunday morning from the television in the kitchen of my childhood home. My mother used "Meet the Press" as a type of household alarm clock. She would shout out the name of that week's important guest, urging me to come watch it. I usually ignored her and went back to sleep — unless the guest was Black. To see a Black person as a featured guest on the "serious" Sunday morning news programs was a major happening in the 1980s and even into the early 1990s. Although Black and brown faces now appear more frequently on those news programs, they are still a relative novelty.
Now, "Meet the Press", like other legacy news media programs (and networks), is struggling. The show's viewership has declined, in large part because of changing demographics. Its core viewers are getting older and younger viewers are not replacing them. The right-wing media echo chamber and its disinformation lie that the mainstream news media such as NBC, ABC, CBS, the New York Times and the Washington Post have a liberal bias has also helped to create a highly polarized and fragmented media environment. As a result, fewer Americans now watch (and trust) the same news programs and outlets. This means that the American people do not have a common frame of reference for politics and truth.
